Procrastination — Control the Monkey Mind

In this article, we will learn about what is procrastination, its effects, and how to tackle it. As a procrastinator, we all have felt many issues such as Deadline Workloads, unnecessary work piling up, creating monkey minds, etc. After going through the article, we will know the root cause of all this and be able to control the Monkey Mind.

Procrastination — A Monkey Mind

Procrastination, in a nutshell, is a habit of delaying important tasks for some unnecessary leisure or habits. Let’s take an example, we had to write an important email with a deadline of tomorrow morning. Now, with most of us being procrastinators, we will delay the task till tomorrow and will send the email tomorrow waking up early in the morning. In between we will be doing all the non-sense tasks such as scrolling our smartphones, talking irrelevantly with our colleagues, etc.

Why Exactly We Procrastinate?

We procrastinate due to the monkey mindset we have developed where we find simple and easy activities for short-term pleasure. But the short-term pleasure continuously goes on till we find the deadline is near. Suddenly the works pile up and we have been overloaded with the work which feels even harder to be done.

Effects Of Procrastination

There can be many effects and disadvantages of the procrastination on our tasks:

1. Guilt: Every moment we spend not doing a task we develop the guilt of wasting the time.
2. Deadline Effects: The deadline effect would be created for all the other works we are involved in as we will be working on the task just before the deadline.
3. Burdensome: Work accumulated will create burdensome on us which would further lead to depression, stress, and unnecessary mood swing issues.
4. Low-Quality Work: When we wait for the work to be completed at the last moment, the work that we do is not up to the mark we can have performed before the deadline period.
5. Stagnant Personal Growth: Our piled-up work would reduce our time for personal growth in relationships, careers, hobbies, and any other thing we are interested in.
6. Never-Ending Short-Term Pleasure: After the procrastination, the major issue is we will be more indulged in the never-ending short-term pleasure which would be far more dangerous.
7. No Deadline — No Work: After being the procrastinator, the deadline effect will be our mindset so we would never work on the important goals of life that have no deadlines.

How Would We Overcome Procrastination?

Now, that we know about procrastination, we can move forward to let know how we can tackle it in day-to-day life.

1. Control Monkey Mind: The foremost step to stop procrastination is to stop the mind from becoming a monkey going here and there relentlessly. As a monkey can be kept quiet by keeping it busy with a banana. The same applies to the mind to get it stable meditate by just looking at the thoughts that are emerging as they are don’t try to control them.
2. Set Up Priority For Tomorrow: We should have to build a habit of setting priorities for tomorrow at the end of each day. We should not need to exact but roughly we should have idea what we would be doing the next day.
3. Reduce Distraction: Before starting working on your task just set up distractions to a minimum like switching off unnecessary notifications from the phone etc. We can use the Pomodoro Technique, which divides the section into two deep works (25 minutes) and breaks (5 minutes). We should also decide the proper to work and to leisure.
4. Fixed Places For Different Activities: We should have fixed our places for work, leisure, eating, etc which would have set our mindset on each place differently.
5. Divide the Task and Deadline: We will be performing more effectively when we divide each task into parts and perform each part with a separate deadline.
6. Start With Easy Task: We should start with an easy task first so that we do not exhaust the energy on the hardest task at the beginning itself.
7. Think In Minutes: When we start thinking in the minutes every minute we pass will be notifiable. Every minute can be better utilized by getting updated each minute to ourselves.
8. Be Kind: Don’t be too hard on yourself. If we had decided something that does not happen be in a light mood to start it at the moment without regret. We can reduce the regret by writing the 1things we would have done that had been planned in the whole day and each day trying to increase the best things.
9. Deadline For Non-Deadline Task: We need to be aware of the larger goals we need to accomplish by writing them down. After writing divide them into milestones with the set deadlines.
10. Don’t Get Busy Be Productive: Set priority to important tasks not just get yourself busy with tasks that are unnecessary and just seem important. Divide each task carefully between the quarters and set time accordingly for each quarter.(Most should be dedicated to 1st and 2nd quarter)

Conclusion

Procrastination cannot be curbed effectively without being self-motivated with a purpose that drives our lives(Ikigai). Procrastinator has the best mind possible we just need to settle the dust in the mind down to see the clear limitless sky. We should also go through a video that would be more helpful in understanding the procrastination by Tim Urban.